Saturday 11 January 2003 22.58 EST
First published on Saturday 11 January 2003 22.58 EST

The Photographby Penelope LivelyViking £14.99, pp236

Who has not wondered what will become of the old letters, photographs and papers we are unable to throw away? Who will sort through them after our deaths? And will the evidence of our lives, one day, betray us? The Photograph, at first, seems a cautionary tale for hoarders, a novel to be read before every spring - or winter - clean. But by the end, Lively has shown that hoarding is as complicated as remembering (and not the same thing).

Glyn, a widowed landscape historian, finds a brown envelope upon which is written, in his late wife's lightly pencilled hand, DON'T OPEN - DESTROY. It contains a photograph he has never seen before. His wife, Kath, is holding hands with a man and her body language cannot be misinterpreted. Nor is there any mystery about the identity of her lover, Glyn knows him well: it's Nick, married to Kath's sister, Elaine.

Glyn is tormented by this second bereavement in which he feels his wife's absence in a new way: it is as if he never knew her. Now, he is consumed by the need to find out who she really was. Lively ably establishes the characters in his quest. Nick is described with particular skill: a selfish, tolerant enthusiast. She notes that he never intends to provoke which is 'in itself an aggravation'.

Aggravation is Lively's forte. It is not that she cannot persuade one that her characters might be sympathetic - it is that she writes most convincingly about their faults. She is equable about vexation. She shows that people are all irritating, in different ways.

Nick's wife, Elaine, is a successful garden designer who distracts herself from the crisis in her domestic life by dreaming about wisteria tunnels, underplanted by alliums. She is a control freak whose belief in her self-sufficiency perhaps needed to be dented. In the tremendous chapter in which Glyn shows her the photograph over a pub lunch she is shocked into silence, her control suddenly impressive. She looks at the photograph and 'sees people who are familiar, but now all of a sudden quite unfamiliar. It is as though both Kath and Nick have undergone some hideous metamorphosis.'

At the centre of the book is Kath - or memories of her. One recognises the type straight away: she was beautiful (dark hair, green eyes) but not vain, spontaneous, vague about money and carried her selfishness so lightly it could be mistaken for charm. If anything, Kath's character is over-established: (she shows up unexpectedly in one scene with extravagant lilies, in another with a tray of peaches. Enough). But the question that has to wait until the end of the book is: what was she really like? This, too, is easy to guess and the ending proves less compelling than the beginning.

In this, Lively's fifteenth novel, there is a curious way in which all her characters ultimately seem invulnerable, as if they needed to be in more dangerous hands. And yet the underlying ideas are acute: she implies that no one should be complacent about intimacy or ever assume complete knowledge of another person. And we should be as careful with our memories as with the snaps in our attics.